A 79-year journey into the screen
One line drawn with a light pen became a new way to see, work, imagine—and eventually, gather.
The thesis
It is a relay: ideas passed from a machine, through a lab, into companies, across decades.
Sketchpad did not simply lead to computer graphics. It introduced a relationship with machines: point, draw, move, constrain, repeat. David Evans built a culture around that relationship in Utah. Evans & Sutherland made it perform in real time. The people around them carried it into Xerox PARC, Adobe, Silicon Graphics and Pixar.
Then Steve Winn saw a different destination hiding in the technology: not a screen for one person, but a place where many people could feel present together.
Five decisive turns
A curated path through nearly eight decades. Each event matters because it makes the next one possible—but never inevitable.
On MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s TX-2, Ivan Sutherland uses a light pen to draw directly on a display. Sketchpad understands relationships: parallel, perpendicular, attached, repeated. Change a master and its instances change with it.
A drawing becomes a model; a display becomes a place to think.
E&S sells its military and commercial simulation assets to Rockwell Collins for $71.5 million and acquires Spitz for approximately $3.4 million, refocusing on digital theaters, planetariums, projection and curved structures.
Rendering software and dome engineering become one company—the stack Cosm will later acquire.
Steve Winn and the Mirasol team study how immersive media could transform real estate and entertainment. An August letter proposes using E&S technology for vertically oriented LED DomeX prototypes in Dallas and Salt Lake City.
The planetarium becomes a social venue for events happening somewhere else.
Cosm opens venues at Hollywood Park in Los Angeles and Grandscape near Dallas. A funding round of more than $250 million backs expansion of the venues, technology and media businesses.
The prototype becomes a repeatable public experience and a new entertainment category.
The relay team
The network includes founders, researchers, engineers, operators and storytellers. Some worked at E&S; others were part of the Utah lab or the companies it seeded. The distinction matters.
Inventor of Sketchpad · Co-founder, Evans & Sutherland
Made the computer screen a place where people could draw, model, constrain, copy and simulate—not merely receive output.
Builder of Utah’s graphics program · Co-founder, Evans & Sutherland
Built the institution and recruited the people who turned computer graphics from a research frontier into an industry.
E&S engineer · Xerox PARC scientist · Co-founder, Adobe
Carried lessons in interactive graphics from Utah and E&S to PARC, then turned device-independent imaging into PostScript at Adobe.
Utah graphics pioneer · Co-founder, Pixar
Turned a childhood ambition to animate into new techniques for curved surfaces, digital images and creative organizations.
Founder and board chairman, Cosm · CEO, Mirasol Capital
Saw that a planetarium-grade LED dome could become a new social venue for live sports and entertainment—and funded the long path from prototype to category.
Co-founder · President and CEO, Cosm
Combined a player’s understanding of live sports with media, product and operating experience to turn the thesis into a venue business.
The founding vision
This is our distillation of the question at the heart of Cosm’s origin story—not a direct quotation. In 2019, Steve Winn’s team proposed a vertically oriented LED DomeX for sports and entertainment. The essential move was conceptual: preserve immersion, remove the headset, add the energy of a crowd.
Read the project’s origin →The living archive
Were you there?
If you worked at E&S, Spitz, LiveLikeVR, C360, Cosm, the Utah graphics lab—or helped build the wider lineage—your memory may contain a piece no corporate record does.
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